Hello, The versions 1.15.6 and 1.15.7 of dpkg introduced several important changes. Let’s skim over them:

* The dpkg-maintscript-helper tool has been introduced in dpkg 1.15.7.2
to help packagers deal with renaming conffiles and removing obsolete
conffiles. Check its manual page dpkg-maintscript-helper(1) for more
details on how to use it. This shell script might be extended over
time to cover other common operations. Feel free to make suggestions
while it’s not too late to make changes on this new interface.

* dpkg-dev provides a new script called dpkg-mergechangelogs that can be
used to do 3-way merges of Debian changelogs. It is already used on
several git repositories to provide automatic merge of
debian/changelog.

* dpkg-dev provides a new script called dpkg-buildflags that packages
should use in debian/rules to retrieve the default value of various
compilation flags. Bug #578597[1] has been submitted against
debian-policy. When generalized this offer us centralized archive-wide
control of the default build flags as well as the possibility for
end-users to try out easily new flags.

* dpkg-source can now be fed options through debian/source/local-options
but this file won’t end up in the generated source package. This can
be useful to include some VCS-specific options (ignore of some
VCS-specific files, –single-debian-patch) in the repository but not
have them in the generated source package.

* The plan concerning dpkg-source and the default source format has been
clarified. In the long term, the default format will disappear and
debian/source/format will become mandatory. The lintian tag
missing-debian-source-format[2] will help us track that.

* dpkg is now more resilient against powerloss and other brutal
interruptions. After several iterations on the topic, the performance
loss due to the supplementary fsync()/sync() should be acceptable in
1.15.7.2 and mostly compensated by the optimization made in other
areas (for example in loading the /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list files).